Valentin Klotzbücher

I’m an economist, now working as a statistician at the University of Basel’s Department of Clinical Research.

Always open to new connections – feel free to reach out!

News

19 Sep 2026 Freiburg Replication Games at the University of Freiburg, organised with Tim Krieger and the Institute for Replication.

Research

Below is a selection of my meta-science contributions and doctoral research, with my clinical work in Basel and a full, current list of publications on Google Scholar.

Meta-science contributions

Evaluations commissioned for The Unjournal, on scale-use heterogeneity in well-being reports (2025), StrongMinds and Friendship Bench (2025) and choosing an effective nudge (2024)
“AI-assisted teams outperform AI-led teams but not human-only teams in assessing research reproducibility in quantitative social science”, with A. Brodeur, D. Valenta, A. Marcoci, et al. PNAS 123(22) (2026)
“The Sources of Researcher Variation in Economics”, with N. Huntington-Klein, C. Pörtner, I. McCarthy & The Many Economists Collaborative. NBER Working Paper 33729
“A comment on ‘They Never had a Chance: Unequal Opportunities and Fair Redistributions’”, with T. Krieger and M. Wallner. I4R Discussion Paper (2025)

Helpline research

Interactive Figure: Conversation Topics in German Helpline Calls

Deviation of conversation topics from their 2019 baseline, in percentage points, for calls to Germany’s two nationwide helplines for young people. Each tab uses that helpline’s own topic taxonomy rather than a harmonised one, so the categories differ between them: TelefonSeelsorge, the country’s largest helpline, records 41 topics for its adult callers, while Nummer gegen Kummer records 88 finer-grained ones, split here into its youth line (callers under 20) and its parent line (callers 20 and over).

Hover any line for the topic, the deviation that week and, for Nummer gegen Kummer, the broader category it belongs to; click a line to highlight it and name it above the plot. Based on some three million calls between January 2019 and May 2022.

Interactive Figure: US Helpline Calls by State

Each grey line is one US state; the mauve line is the nationwide weekly average. Calls are shown as deviations from each state’s own average over the period, so states of very different size can share one scale, and the two helplines get their own panel because they swing by very different amounts. Hover any line to identify the state, or click it to highlight that state in both panels and name it above the plot. Source data for Fig. 4 and Extended Data Fig. 6, covering January 2020 to March 2021.

“Young people’s mental and social distress in times of international crisis: evidence from helpline calls, 2019-2022”, with M. Brülhart and R. Lalive. Scientific Reports 13, 11858 (2023). Stata code | PNAS News Feature
“Mental health concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic as revealed by helpline calls”, with M. Brülhart, R. Lalive and S. Reich. Nature 600: 121-126 (2021). PDF | Stata code | Behind the paper | Coronapod | Nature News&Views
“Lost in Lockdown? COVID-19, Social Distancing, and Mental Health in Germany”, with S. Reich. Covid Economics 22: 117-153 (2020)

Political economy

Interactive Figure: Terror Groups, 1860-1950

Each marker is one terror group, placed at the city where it formed; hover for its name, ideology and years of activity. The two social-revolutionary ideologies the paper is about — anarchist and leftist — are drawn in colour; the remaining ideologies recede into greys but are all still shown and named on hover. Drag to pan and use the buttons at the top right to zoom — useful for the dense European cluster. Groups from the same city are fanned out slightly so they stay distinguishable, and present-day borders are drawn for orientation only.

Group data are from J. Tschantret, “The old terrorism: a dataset, 1860–1969”, International Interactions 45(5): 933–948 (2019), as used in “Class warfare” below.

“Chapter 20: Tourism”, with G. Schulze. In The Cambridge Handbook on the Economics of Terrorism (eds. Basuchoudary & Schulze): 442-456 (2026)
“Class warfare: Political exclusion of the poor and the roots of social-revolutionary terrorism, 1860-1950”, with T. Krieger and D. Meierrieks. Defence and Peace Economics 32(6): 681-697 (2021). Also in: On Terrorist Groups (Routledge, 2023). Replication files

Get in touch

valentin.klotzbuecher@unibas.ch

Department of Clinical Research University of Basel | University Hospital Basel